Please, Don't Spill Coffee On The Printers

Currently we’re in Copenhagen for the launch of the HP Designjet and Bjarke Ingels’8-House premiere. Coincidentally we stumbled upon an interesting new coffee bar concept here. The bar on the picture called Fotocaféen is a photo and printing coffee bar, which means that the art of photography and the crafts and service of printing are spatially combined with a space to sit, hang around, talk and drink coffee. The place breaths a bar atmosphere and design, but gives room to pretty much printing equipment that can be used by customers, and it provides services like free Wi-Fi. Besides that, the bar has a role as a meeting place for Copenhagen’s photography scene, which gives it a little touch of an artist’s bar.

In the past we and other blogs have already written about cross-over formulas with coffee as a main ingredient, such as the book store as a coffee bar and, not so long ago, the urban bike bar (bike repair shops spatially combined with a coffee service and a cosy hang-out). The discovery of this printing and coffee bar in Copenhagen reveals an ‘everything could be a coffee bar’ trend in contemporary cities. In fact, pretty many urban functions have the potention to be combined with serving coffee and creating a nice place. What about the launderette as a coffee bar, the car wash as a coffee bar or the fitness center as a coffee bar, or, even better, the furniture store. This idea works for services or shops with two main components. First, the products or services offered should have some lifestyle components in them. It connects with a group of people that like to hang out with a subculture formed around the service provided, such as bikers in a bike coffee bar and photographers in a printing coffee bar. Secondly, people have to come to this place anyway, so why not drink a cup of coffee while waiting? Applying this coffee bar formula means creating a more profound connection with the customers. One creates a community around a brand or service with specific lifestyle components in it, instead of offering a single run away service.

Brooklyn-based artist and architect Chat Travieso has designed a series of collapsible shelters for urban camping purposes. Made of steel, wood, aluminum, masonite, plastic, foam, canvas, and found cart, Travieso’s good-looking one-person structures are foldable and allow for easy set-up anywhere in the urban jungle.

With all the ambient light and the pollution of modern cities, delightful moments when you can lie and gaze at stars are rare. Régine Debatty from We Make Money Not Art spotted a lovely project that will delight the Londoners. The Urban Stargazing installation by the French product designer Oscar Lhermitte “focuses on bringing back…

Last year, Le Cool invited us to be one of the contributors to a new book about ideas and projects that improve the city. We were very glad to find the final result in our post box some weeks ago. ‘A Smart Guide to Utopia’ is a book about cool urban initiatives, but not just another book about cool urban initiatives. It starts out with a fabulous admission from Ben Hammersley: that the city is the natural habitat of humanity. We need our cities just as much as they need us. They are the engines of humanity, and this book shows 111 different ways that this is happening right now.